In the Beginning…
POSTER
In the Beginning…
LIMITED EDITION
In the Beginning…
In the Beginning
GENESIS 1:1
The foundation of the Gematriart Torah is the correlation of the gematria (numeric word value), for Biblical Hebrew names for the primary colours red, yellow, green and blue to the corresponding spectral colour wave-frequency of each colour.
Mapping the highest and lowest gematria word values in the Torah to the extremities of the visible spectrum results in the gematria value for Red, ‘adom’ falling in the red region of the spectrum, and likewise the other primary colour names in their corresponding regions.
The inspiration behind this Work of Gematriart, is the first four Hebrew words of the Torah; In the Beginning God Created…
The Hebrew word ‘et,’ which is the fourth word of the Torah despite an absence of grammatical necessity, alludes to the Kabbalistic understanding that a fundamental part of the Creation of the universe was the alphabet. This connection to the Kabbalistic teachings of the ancient ‘Sefer Yetzirah’ (Book of Creation) stems from the recognition that the word ‘et’ is comprised of the first and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet, within which the entirety of the alphabet is encompassed – the building blocks of the written Torah.
Remarkably, parallel to this, the first four words of the Gematriart Torah are blue, yellow, red and green – the primary colour building blocks upon which the Gematriart cypher is built. The order they appear corresponding to the colour perception opponent colour pairs; blue, yellow and red, green.
In the Beginning God Created…
בראשית ‘Bereshit’ – blue
ברא ‘bara’ – yellow
אלקים ‘Elokim’ – red
את ‘et’ – green
Furthermore, this colour sequence, correspond in descending order, to the number of occurrences of each colour in the Gematriart Torah. Blue is the least frequent, followed by yellow, then red, and then green – with the highest number of occurrences.
To emphasise the relationship of these first four words to that of encompassing the entire Torah, the olive-green background is the colour achieved from mixing every colour swatch (word) of the Gematriart Torah, to create an average colour. The relevance of mixing an average Torah colour is derived from other works of Gematriart, “The Law of Averages” limited edition prints.
Additionally, the fine red and yellow lines (central in the limited edition prints), draws on the creation of light – a key component to experiencing colour. The two Hebrew words “Vayehi Ohr” (there was light), are fortuitously red and yellow, commonly used to depict a flash of light, and straddle the Torah text exact mid-point of Creation Day One.